GraphRAG-Enabled Local Large Language Model for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Development of a Proof-of-Concept

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a prevalent chronic condition that affects maternal and fetal health outcomes worldwide, increasingly in underserved populations. While generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in health care, their application in GDM management remains underexplored.

This study aimed to investigate whether retrieval-augmented generation techniques, when combined with knowledge graphs (KGs), could improve the contextual relevance and accuracy of AI-driven clinical decision support. For this, we developed and validated a graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG)-enabled local LLM as a clinical support tool for GDM management, assessing its performance against open-source LLM tools.

A prototype clinical AI assistant was developed using a GraphRAG constructed from 1212 peer-reviewed research articles on GDM interventions, retrieved from the Semantic Scholar API (2000-2024). The GraphRAG prototype integrated entity extraction, KG construction using Neo4j, and retrieval-augmented response generation. The performance was evaluated in a simulated environment using clinical and layperson prompts, comparing the outputs of the systems against ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and BioMistral models across 5 common natural language generation metrics.

The GraphRAG-enabled local LLM showed higher accuracy in generating clinically relevant responses. It achieved a bilingual evaluation understudy score of 0.99, Jaccard similarity of 0.98, and BERTScore of 0.98, outperforming the benchmark LLMs. The prototype also produced accurate, evidence-based recommendations for clinicians and patients, demonstrating its feasibility as a clinical support tool.

GraphRAG-enabled local LLMs show much potential for improving personalized GDM care by integrating domain-specific evidence and contextual retrieval. Our prototype proof-of-concept serves two purposes: (1) the local LLM architecture gives practitioners from underserved locations access to state-of-the-art medical research in the treatment of chronic conditions and (2) the KG schema may be feasibly built on peer-reviewed, indexed publications, devoid of hallucinations and contextualized with patient data. We conclude that advanced AI techniques such as KGs, retrieval-augmented generation, and local LLMs improve GDM management decisions and other similar conditions and advance equitable health care delivery in resource-constrained health care environments.